Friday
Dec032010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Good news
Dec 3, 2010 Climate: CRU Prince Charles has backed CRU scientists. In view of some of his other causes (homeopathy and the like) this is probably good news.
Dec 3, 2010 Climate: CRU
Reader Comments (57)
But when he talks to his plants the CO2 in his breath makes them happy, it works the same for the vegetables at CRU and UEA.
Isn't he one of the Chuckle Brothers? Not to be taken seriously.
HRH quote:
"I wanted to discuss with them the appalling treatment they had endured" ...and other Princely rubbish etc
I would like the so called scientists from UEA to discuss the appalling treatment these "scientists" had dished out to the various people who legally requested information under FOIs, and who were, allegedly, illegally refused this information on the gounds that it would only end up proving that they, the scientists, might be wrong.
Again, the Prince has proven he really is an appalling judge of character.
Peter Walsh
Prince Chuck is of a similar age to me. Despite the best private education that money could buy, I recall he didn't do very well in his O-levels, A-levels or at university. I doubt if he has learned much since those days; and it shows. I had to make do with the local village and grammar schools before university.
"It is an academic institution working to understand precisely and dispassionately ..."
Hmm, 'dispassionately' does not seem to be the right word choice to describe the attitudes revealed in the climategate emails.
"A number of reviews were launched into the affair but none
foundlooked at the evidence of scientific malpractice."There, fixed that for them.
You guys have a prince?
Despite the best private education that money could buy . . .
Hmmm. I went to a public (i.e. private) school not far from Gordounstoun and am an almost exact contemporary of Charles Windsor. I don't know what its reputation is now but in those days it was best known for explicitly (if discretely) catering for the conceptually challenged offspring of the great and the good. The emphasis was on outdoor activities and the like. There's nothing wrong with that and exam results and university places do not make a man - but you get the point.
Your comment brings to mind a rumpus when Gordounstoun sent a team for a rugby match: some of my contemporaries (though not, of course, me) lined the driveway to make schoolboy gestures suggesting that those on the bus, well, represented a lower strain of primate than we did. No one did that when a team from the likes of Fettes turned up: the miscreants knew what they were about.
I forget who it was who described Charles's tastes in architecture as an uneasy mix of William Morris and Albert Speer but the remark is socially as well as aesthetically perceptive. Whatever, the prince has no business interfering in a manifestly political issue and would do well to follow his mother's example in that regard.
The personage formally known as Chuck has spoken.
No wonder old ma Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, is hanging on.
Ah, I've realised where Chuckles is coming from on warble gloaming. If you've got some carbon dioxide and you mix it with some air to dilute it, and then you mix the diluted mixture with some more air, and then you mix that with yet more air and so on until you've got it down to, say, three or four hundred parts per million, something incredible happens: the whole atmosphere remembers what it would be like to be pure CO2 and begins to heat up.
/Private Fraser voice
We're doomed. Dooooooomed.
Don't be too hard on the poor boy, he's just helping his ma, who's been struggling against energy poverty and rising costs. Palaces aren't exactly energy efficient, heating bills have increased and staff xmas parties have had to be cancelled. Luckily, our air to the throne spotted a way to make some money to help pay the bills. Onshore windmills are monstrous carbuncles, offshore are built on their land. Should help suplement the pin money from dredging.
More Good News!!!
The Campaign Against Climate Change are running out of money!!!
From the Guardian - Ahead of the Campaign Against Climate Change's march in the snow tomorrow.....
Phil Thornill - Founder/National Co-ordinator.
"And he's worried about his organisation, Campaign Against Climate Change, which is, he says frankly, "running out of money massively. I'm exhausted, we've been running on risible funds for years now, and to be honest I don't know what we're going to do."
Given CACC's position as one of the very first groups campaigning straightforwardly on climate change, it is indeed worrying that they, sitting in the middle of the campaign spectrum from conservative to radical, should be going bust."
-------------------
Makes an interesting read.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/dec/03/campaign-against-climate-change-march-thornhill
the comments are amusing
the University of East Anglia is not a campaigning NGO, nor an industry lobby group. "It is an academic institution..."
...that you can get into with three Bs.
Such people must seem like geniuses to Charles. He only managed a B and a C. Three A-Levels were beyond him.
Charles lll would be well advised to study the tribulations that Charles l encountered as he pushed an unwanted religion.
Speaking of campaigning NGO's and lobbying, nice article from El Reg concerning a TPA report
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/03/environmentalists_use_tax_cash_to_sway_policy/
And TPA report here
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/home/2010/12/new-tpa-research-taxpayer-funded-environmentalism.html
I am no monarchist and as sceptic as anyone, but don't be too hard on Charles as a person. It isn't his fault that his mama and papa are royals.
His work with troubled young people is a genuine interest of his and of great value .. I have seen the results at first hand. And one-on-one away from media scrutiny, he seems to be a nice guy too.
Perhaps he is too easily led, perhaps he has difficulty thinking things through, but unlike many greenies he has a warm heart and what you see is what you get.
Its fine to suggest that he is misguided on this matter - and I would agree with you - but not to attack him as a person or his character.
Right that's over. Now bring me the Head of a Warmist/Catastrophist on a plate!
Hey, Justice4Rinka, don't lump us lazy kids who got a C and a D with the thickoes!
Phillip Bratby:
“I had to make do with the local village and grammar schools..”
That’s nothing. My grammar school didn’t even have a village.
"The word MUST is not used to Princes."
Barry Woods:
“The Campaign Against Climate Change are running out of money!!”
And out of tweets. A friend of mine pointed out on the Graun thread a few hours ago that they’d only had two twitters all day and encouraged readers to support them. Not a cheep.
Latimer Alder
I appreciate what you are saying but unfortunately Charles seems incapable of doing what royals have sensibly done since they lost most of their political power, keeping his gob shut on controversial issues.
Non-Britons may not realise that he has been doing this for years on everything from "video nasties" to architecture and quack medicine regardless of how ignorant he is on many of these subjects.
He is not supposed to have any political power but he unsubtly attempts to influence elected politicians when he has no right to do so beyond accident of birth.
The Queen realizes that royalty has the best chance of surviving if it apparently has no more than figurehead status. If royalty wants to be in the political arena then it is going to ultimately become accountable - and Charles may not like the results of accountability e.g. becoming Mr.Windsor.
Careful, they know who you are :)
New Age terrorists develop homeopathic bomb
It's obvious that the cherry brandy went to his head when he was a sub-teen and is still there.
Youse guys are so funny.
I absolutely love your comments!
Tks.
PW
Just been reading that Guardiad CACC thing -
I do hope someone is there tomorrow on the march to take pictures, it's too far to go just to point and laugh. I cannot for the life of me imagine how it will create any good publicity, have they no common sense at all? The mind boggles.
OOPS,
I should have added, but I was splitting my sides laughing,
Satire, is the GREATEST form of wit.
Chuck that at Chuck.
PW
Charles has spent so much of his later life attaching himself to the nonsensical and irrational that one can pretty much use him as a contrarian barometer.
Looks like Prince Charles still not quite getting the hang of the evidence thing. This made me laugh too (my emphasis):
So... they lobbied you to remind us that they are not a lobby group? Eh? Oh, sorry, to remind us that they are not an *industrial* lobby group. Because industrial lobby groups are teh eeeevil, but academic lobby groups are pure. Oops, my irony meters broken again.
That said, apparently he is their patron so it is not entirely surprising to find him supporting them. But yeah, rationality never was his strong suit.
Spence_UK you bring to mind the possibility that in the quote you give, he was possibly patronising them?
I predicted a year ago that Phil Jones would get (at least) a knighthood from Chuckles.
Can he have much longer to wait?
Why does Britain still give the royals any attention? I can't figure this out. They're just like any other family in the world except they lost the DNA lottery and won the landowning one. Paying attention to what they have to say in anything strikes me as silly as being some kind of avid fan of anyone from Hollywood.
Mind you, if someone were holding a gun to me forcing me to choose which world-renowned group of people or person to be a "superfan" of, the royal family is about the only thing I could reply with and still respect myself.
Re: CACC !?
Isn't that what you leave a (carbon) footprint in when you don't look where you're walking?
I am a lifelong monarchist and will remain so even when the Windsor Village idiot becomes the head of the family. I just won't tell anyone! (Well I've got a reasonable reputation and I don't want to loose it!)
Still I'm glad he's on their side because I don't want him on ours.
Sadly he's one of those people like Toynbee and Benn. If you want to do right watch them and take the opposite tack.
The hilarious "homeopathic bomb" story that Frosty linked totally cracked me up.
And it may prompt me to carry out the experiment I've always wondered about--play a blank CD in my Bose stereo at max volume and see if it produces never-before-experienced extremes of silence.
I don't understand how he reconciles his love for the old (energy wasting, inefficient, low rise, architecture from the past) with his new found love of CO2 reduction, conservation, alternative energy, etc. If he knew anything about logic he would realize we either live in old, inefficient buildings, or we tear down everything he's believed in architecturally and build new, energy efficient, minimalist buildings.
My voice from the colonies--What a tool!
@ Latimer Adler (Dec 3, 2010 at 6:34 PM | Latimer Alder) - Thanks for that. HRH is a pretty decent fellow, and notwithstanding the slurs on his preferences, particularly strong on the appalling things architects have foisted on us in recent years. He is most certainly wrong on AGW, but I can't see a sceptic, even if he made it onto the personal staff, having the balls to put him straight. If you'll pardon the expression.
Re: Tim Bromige @ 10:48
Tim, surely his valet can tell him while he's brushing Chuck's teeth for him. Or maybe while his six eggs are being boiled. (No he's not a piggy: he'll pick just one and dump the other five! Now that's how not to cut a carbon footprint.)
Prince Charles in action
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqObJtGrKaA
Luckily, our air to the throne... (Atomic Hairdryer)
If that misspelling was intentional; my respect, sir.
If not, then take a bow anyway for having written a most humorous sentence.
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2010/12/03/lawrence-solomon-hockey-stick-coverup-a-sequel/
More fallout over the University of Virginia’s mysterious conduct concerning the infamous hockey stick graph, the UN icon that purported to show that temperatures were steady over the last thousand years before shooting up in the last century.
The University of Virginia, which employed Michael Mann, the graph’s creator, and which received government funding that financed research for the graph, has been fighting attempts by investigators to learn its exact role in the entire affair. One of its manoeuvres: falsely telling a state lawmaker who requested information under the Freedom of Information Act that it no longer had access to the documents he requested.
That falsehood came to light after state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli decided to use the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act to compel the university to turn over documents related to Mann’s work. The university now admits it had the documents it refused to earlier divulge, but is still resisting handing them over.
To encourage the university and others to obey the law, a state legislator is introducing two bills. The first, available here, would make public employees who violate public information laws subject to fines and firing. The second, soon to be introduced, would thwart future cover-ups by public officials by requiring that all documents created by any public official be categorized at the time of their creation as either subject to public information laws or exempt from them.
Royal families are notoriously inbred. This is what you get when you mix German and Greek inbreeding and dump it in Britain.
Chuck's comments should therefore be taken in the context as being from someone from the shallow end of the gene pool.
HRH has a lot of confused and conflicting ideas, with an overblown estimate of their value.
If he keeps them to himself when he becomes king, that won't matter. Otherwise he'll end up like his granduncle.
The present incumbent is not the first lunatic holding the title of Prince of Wales, and I doubt he'll be the last. One can only fervently hope that the men in white coats have a chance to get to him before he becomes king, by default.
Let one of his sons not shame him at the ClimateGate.
==========================
Homeopathy!?! Goodness gracious. People have been joking about homeopathy since the time of Abraham Lincoln.
"as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death." - A. Lincoln, 1858, in reference to the "Freeport Doctrine" of Stephen Douglas.
"I predicted a year ago that Phil Jones would get (at least) a knighthood from Chuckles.
Can he have much longer to wait?"
I was just about to say "many MBEs were guaranteed today".
You stole my thunder. And you waited a year to confess it.
"One can only fervently hope that the men in white coats have a chance to get to him before he becomes king, by default."
Don't count on it. Royalty have always been treated like prize horses. With the current clean environment, easy and peaceful lifestyle, medical advances, and with the longevity gene that he seems to be blessed with, he may be celebrating his hundredth birthday firmly on his feet.
I hope this will give Ben Goldacre food for thought. It's been disappointing to see him on the side of the credulous in this controversy, perhaps seeing His Royal Highness pitch in will encourage him to look at the other side of the argument.
Celebrity scientist Brian Cox was putting the boot into skepticism and patting CRU on the back on the BBC's Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture 2010 "Science - a Challenge to TV Orthodoxy" recently. He basically said that scienctific fact is whatever the current dogma says it is, ignore what you personally know of the underlying science, don't think for yourself but place your faith in the peer review process and anyone that disagrees is a nutter that the media should ignore.
As a scientist I can think of nothing more corrupting of science than the attitude that anything which deviates from the accepted mainstream view should be suppressed.
Coldfinger
There is a full post on Cox's lecture. While there was much to take issue with in his lecture, I don't think you are being entirely fair to him. He didn't say dissenting views should be suppressed.